Vibraphone

I was chatting with my Dad tonight and he mentioned he heard Skylark on the radio and thought it would be nice to learn.

I couldn't find it in my two fake books, which I am surprised. I thought it was a popular standard.

I started doing some research and hit on this album from Boz Scaggs, who I remember from the 70's ("Lido Shuffle", anyone?).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001J10RLG/ref=sr_1_album_12_rd?ie=UTF…

The interesting part of all of this was that I heard vibraphone in some of the songs. It was Mike Mainieri (vibes/marimba).

here is another version of my tune hade allasmaladic this time with guitar...

this is my arragement of billy joel´s just the way you are in 7/8 (most of the time) with my duo partner jan on guitar.still (like everything i post) far away from perfect.i hope this will change some holy day...

I was hanging online with barryk and I found used mussers for 4500 and 4800 dollars over at www.malletshop.com.

I couldn't believe that so I inquired why are they were so high priced. I thought I'd pass along the malletshop's answer:

I wonder what Nico thinks about all this.
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I am working on "Somewhere In the Night" by Milton Raskin and Billy May. I first heard it on Cal Tjader's "Soul Sauce" album. See "Check This Out" link. I can't find the sheet music so I am trying to figure out the changes. I stopped listening the recordings and just played some chords that I thought sounded good with the melody. I don't know if I have the changes right or not. I'll work on that more another time. I put these chords into BIAB and started jamming with it. Spent a couple hours tonight. Had fun. Here is a snippet from my jamming and the backing track.

When I practice it takes me a good hour before I can really start to get somewhere. It seems like for me that that first hour doesn't really even count although i have to do it to get past everything else. Get past what? The day, the crap, the business, the other side of the brain stuff.

I think of that and I want to pass it on. I can't imagine I'm unique, most of us must have this buffer that we have to get past. It's probably important to find out where your buffer ends and make a note of it.

barryk found this video. Here's an example of the traditional grip and a great rendition of a Piazzolla piece 'Nightclub'.

I thought about one thing about Piazzolla and his success. First of all the music is beautiful. I also thought that maybe for classical musicians it was a rare opportunity to play around with 'jazz' harmony. I can't think of better word, but you guys get the idea. The Tango and the Bossa Nova and Samba all use jazz harmonies and I know classical players like to play arrangements of them.

What do you guys think?

We're starting the new week with a load of work ahead, unfortunatelly hardly any work this week is scheduled for production of the vibrahones themselves.
We're gonna spend a lot of time on finishing our pre-production glockenspiel which we made in conjunction with Fall Creek Marimbas. About 95% of the instrument is done, just a few things still to be produced.

I've designed the instrument such that all parts are machined in our magical CNC-machine in which we also produce the vibraphone bars. This reduces the labour to just assembling the glocks.

Here are a couple videos from vibraphonist, Andrei Pushkarev. He uses the traditional 4-mallet grip

, where the inner mallets are on top, versus the Burton grip where the outside mallets are on top.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNWTXDD53EE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGy2cZAl46M

This cat can play! Who is he?